Internet Marketing Introduction for Absolute Beginners

Online Internet marketing in a nutshell

If you have a website and are wondering 'what now?', then this web page is the place for you, since you really need to be thinking about marketing your website online in order for it to perform well in the search engines, and to do this you need to make some headway finding out about Website Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

If this sounds like you then read the three introductory web marketing lessons below.

Internet Marketing Synonyms - other words used to describe Internet Marketing:

• Search engine optimisation / SEO (also search engine Optimization)
• Search engine Marketing / SEM
• Web Marketing
• Google Marketing
• Online Marketing

Definitions of Internet marketing

Internet marketing might be described as any of the following:

• promoting your business online
• improving your search engine ranking
• improving your search engine placement
• improving your search engine positions
• increasing your online visibility
• increasing your online profile
• increasing your Internet real estate
• growing your online footprint
• increasing the number of unique visitors to your website
• increasing your conversion rates.
• making more sales online
• becoming popular on the Internet

At the end of the day though these all boil down to the same thing - numbers. You need visitors to your website and you need those visitors to become customers. Without seachers finding you in the search engines' organic results, the best that you can hope for is a pretty website that you can show to your existing customers or to which you can direct new customers who found you from a channel other than the Internet. Alternatively, in order to drive traffic to your website, you might find yourself restricted to paid-for traffic from Pay per click (PPC) advertising systems such as Google Adwords.

Lesson 1 - Hungry Hungry Search Engines

Search engines love words - they feed off them ravenously. They send hungry little bots out to your website for the very purpose of gathering words about your business which they garner, categorise and store. You need to satiate the search engines' hunger for words by giving them as many relevant ones about your business as you can manage. This is what Information Technology is - the use of technology to store and organise information. If you don't provide very much textual information then don't expect to get found in an awful hurry or for an awful lot of different searches made through the search engines.

The words you identify that are relevant to your business are known as your 'keywords' or key phrases' and these are what you want to concentrate upon ranking well for in the search engines.

Lesson 2 - Webs, the Internet, Networks and Spiders

Think about all these words in the title of this lesson - they illustrate that there is a great big network of online information out there, connected just like a spiders' web. The search engines send their bots (spiders) out to crawl around this web gathering information as they go. The method of movement they use is to traverse links / hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are what connect up the Internet, they are the fibres or threads of the information super highway and without them the Internet would be a much smaller and very different place.

It stands to reason then that the more hyperlinks pointing to your website and the more internal links there are inside your website, the more relevance your website will have, the more it will get visited and the more the search engines will like you. There are good and bad types of links and getting links to your website is much more difficult than including lots of internal links within your website, but that's the subject of a whole other lesson, and could and has taken up book length studies. The important thing to remember is that links to your website and links within your website are important.

Lesson 3 - Logic, Structure and Presentation

We have already mentioned that search engines store and organise the words and strings of words that they find on your website. In fact, search engine spiders or bots are very organised little creatures and they will look at the information you provide about the words on your website in order to decide how important they are and what is relevant about them. The HTML markup language provides a very useful way of presenting this information to them, because it is itself a very logical language which provides semantic indicators to present clearly a hierarchical structure which search engine spiders can use to evaluate the importance of the words they find.

As we have said, search engines eat words, and you need to help them to distinguish between the main course and the side salad.

For instance,

<title>Extremely important text</title>

<h1>Extremely important text</h1>

<h2>Very important text</h2>

<h3>quite important text</h3>

<p>A paragraph of text</p>

<p>some text some <em>important italicised text within a paragraph</em> text some text</p>

<p>some text some <strong>important bold text within a paragraph</strong> text some text</p>

<p>some text some <i>italicised text within a paragraph that isn't any more important than the words around it</i> text some text</p>

<p>some text some <b>bold text within a paragraph that isn't any more important than the words around it</b> text some text</p>

<td>pretty irrelevant text nested in a table data cell</td>

<div>pretty irrelevant text nested in a div tag</div>

Some websites make absolutely no use of HTML semantic indicators, because it is possible, using CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) to make the text look any way you want with whatever HTML tag you decide to use- so for instance, text in a DIV tag can be made to look like a first level heading. This method is utterly useless to search engines though, because the spiders can not guess that the text is an important heading unless it is in the right HTML tag.

You now have an overview of the very basics of Internet Marketing: Content, link building and logical, semantic HTML markup. You can learn more by researching on the Internet, having a look at our search engine marketing blog, or through one of our SEO training courses or SEO consultancy sessions.

Chris Boswell

Contact an SEO consultant

E: info@foursquareinnovations.co.uk
T: 0844 493 3699

Related information about SEO:

SEO: an integrated approach (presentation opens in a new window)

SEO information and help

Internet marketing tips - onsite SEO (downloadable pdf opens in a new Window)

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